Domingo’s Puccini

Mark Swed is probably right that Puccini’s “Rondine” is so little known that most audiences will not be aware of or protest Marta Domingo’s travesty of the ending (“New Twists on a Rarity From Puccini,” April 18). But those of us who do know and love the opera are more shocked by such tampering than any number of “updated” stagings. What will we have next? A happy ending for “Tristan and Isolde” or “Rigoletto”?

What really puzzles me, however, is why she thought her version was superior to Puccini’s. Puccini wrote something of a “reverse” “Traviata,” in which it is not the demimondaine who suffers and dies but the man who cries out at the end “Don’t leave me alone!” In the original version, Magda is by far the more mature of the two, and when a kindly, welcoming letter from her lover’s mother arrives, she realizes instantly that she can no longer deceive him about her past or marry him.

In Domingo’s rewrite, the letter accuses Magda of being a whore, and when her lover throws this in her face, it is she who pleads for forgiveness. When her lover stalks off, she walks Virginia Woolf-like into the sea (thereby also robbing the score of that final, delicious, offstage “Ah”). Surely, in this age of feminism, this is no improvement. Puccini’s bittersweet insight was that Magda would go back to her life in Paris, sadder perhaps but not broken, whereas a young man like Ruggero might very well spend the rest of his life regretting this lost love.

SHEILA K. JOHNSON

Cardiff

*

I personally found both the staging and singing performances to be exemplary and in the finest traditions of the art form.

The commendably artistic vision that Marta Domingo chose to pursue at the conclusion of the third act was both moving and, I believe, in keeping with Puccini’s spirit (if not explicitly the letter of the libretto).

I wholeheartedly welcome Domingo’s future association with Los Angele Opera. She is refreshingly not afraid to pursue fruitful avenues of expression that some myopic reviewers inexplicably hold sacrosanct.

BLAKE C. THOMAS

Ventura